Rocketdyne to Raze Its Pioneer Testing Plant in Simi Hills : Technology: In a cost-cutting move, the company’s rocket test stand will be taken apart and the site returned to nature.
A sentimental link to America’s earliest experiments with the massive rockets that would later carry astronauts into space is about to be severed with the razing of the first commercial testing station in Southern California.
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Vertical Test Stand-1 in the Simi Hills was where German expatriate scientists and American engineers mastered the complexities of rocket technology in a high-stakes, Cold War-era race for space and missile supremacy with the Soviet Union.
“VTS-1 was kind of a milestone in the country’s rocket history and is now going to dust with the other machinery of its time,” said Charlie McKeon, a retired engineer for Rockwell International’s Rocketdyne Division. McKeon, who now serves as a consultant to the company, joined Rocketdyne in 1953 at the height of its rocket-testing program and worked at the site.
Rocketdyne officials said the company is razing Vertical Test Stand 1--VTS-1 as it is commonly called--along with 174 other outmoded facilities to cut overhead costs. Rocketdyne spends about $30 million a year on taxes, licensing and maintenance of the sites even though they have been dormant for years, said Jerry Gaylord, manager of special projects in Rocketdyne’s environmental health and safety division.
“The buildings have no value to the company anymore,” Gaylord said. “They are in disrepair and look terrible and we’re trying to get rid of that eyesore.”
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Built in the bowl-shaped canyon amid the craggy rocks of the Santa Susana Mountains in eastern Ventura County, the 300-foot tall, steel structure looks more like a gigantic erector set than a major rocket-testing site.
The towering VTS-1 now stands dormant on the edge of the eerily quiet area along with its defunct successor, VTS-2. Owls, snakes and coyotes now live in its landings and beneath its massive flame bucket.
Thigh-high weeds poke through gratings and concrete. Rust replaces the paint--worn thin by weather and heat--on the giant metal structure that lies southeast of Simi Valley near the county line.
Forty years ago, the test stand awed aspiring scientists and became the testing ground for warhead engines, as well as early versions of the Mercury and later spaceship engines.
It was a nail-biting time for those involved in rocket technology as workers sweated out the early tests before the rocket engines rolled out of the 2,700-acre site and roared into space.
“This was a pioneer test stand that ran a pioneer rocket system” for the United States, McKeon said.
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With an increased interest in developing rocket power after World War II, but little knowledge of how to build test stands, officials at North American Aviation, Rockwell’s predecessor, copied German sites. Pieces of the German Pennemunde plant were used in the construction of VTS-1, according to Rocketdyne records. Pennemunde was the testing ground for the German V-2 rocket missiles that bombed London repeatedly from 1944 to 1945.
“We had our most tremendous successes and our most tremendous anomalies there,” said Bill Vietinghoff, 66, who was in charge of the combustion facility for Rocketdyne in the 1950s and ‘60s at the VTS-1 site.
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During the Cold War years, Wernher von Braun and other German rocket experts became regular visitors to the site, helping to analyze the V-2 engine and advance American rocketry. During the late 1950s, as many as five rocket engines were tested each day at VTS-1 as the United States intensified its competition to get a man in orbit before its Soviet adversaries.
The rocket engines were hoisted 75 feet in the air and then mounted on stands to be monitored by various gauges. Liquid oxygen and hydrocarbon fuel were fed from tanks above and the flames were caught by the giant chutes below.
During testing, the booming vibrations from the thundering engines regularly rattled residences throughout Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley, sometimes prompting homeowners, fearing an earthquake, to call police. Balls of brilliant orange and yellow flames could be seen several miles away on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
“You were dealing with high levels of power we were never used to and your body would shake sometimes when the engines were being tested,” Vietinghoff said.
Scientists also worked on the Air Force’s Atlas and Thor intercontinental ballistic missile programs.
The greatest testing achievement of the VTS-1, and one of its last before it was decommissioned in the early 1960s, came in 1957. The structure was used to test the Redstone rocket engine, a 75,000-pound thrust engine that was used four years later to launch Alan B. Shepard Jr. into space.
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With each new generation of rocket engines, however, came the need for more sophisticated testing sites. By the late 1960s, the VTS-1, along with its cousins the VTS-2 and the Horizontal Test Stand (HTS), were phased out of operation.
The HTS was demolished long ago, but because of sentimental reasons Rocketdyne employees asked for a fence to be erected around the VTS-1, said Paul Sewell, spokesman for Rocketdyne. There was talk about reopening the VTS-1, but that time never came.
Damile Metal Supply Inc. of Los Angeles will take the testing site apart at no cost and will keep and recycle the steel, Gaylord said. Once the demolition is complete all of the roads, concrete and asphalt will be removed and the area will be restored to its natural state.
“We took the area away from the tarantulas and the deer and all the wildlife and now they’re going to reclaim it,” McKeon said.
